Thursday, June 30, 2016

We are
seeing a renewed interest in socialism today. The campaign of Bernie Sanders,
who claims to be a “democratic socialist” to mask his 98-percent Democratic
Party-line voting record, has given much publicity to the word “socialist,” and
many young Sanders supporters call themselves socialists. The Sanders candidacy
is no accident. His “democratic socialist” and anti-establishment-sounding
“political revolution” rhetoric is aimed at sheepherding the growing hatred of
tens of millions back into the safe channels of capitalist elections and the
rule of the one percent.

Due to this
evidence of the possibilities available to socialists right now, Socialist
Action has decided to run its own presidential candidate, Jeff Mackler, to
build support for working-class, independent, socialist politics. I sat down
with Jeff Mackler for an interview shortly after Socialist Action had announced
his candidacy, to talk about the campaign, key issues in the election, and the
increased interest in socialist ideas.

“The ruling
elite and their think tanks often know well before we do,” Mackler began, “that
their across-the-board austerity measures, their ingrained racist
school-to-prison pipeline, their unprecedented mass incarceration of the
oppressed, their for-profit, near-slave-labor prison-industrial complex, their
wanton and judicially ‘justified’ police murders across the country have served
to bring into question in the minds of millions the very legitimacy of
capitalism itself.

“When poll
after poll tell us, as with the recent New York Times result, that 56
percent of registered Democrats believe that ‘socialism is a more humane system
than capitalism,’ we should take note that Sanders’ self-proclaimed socialism
is no accident of a newcomer wandering onto center stage of U.S. politics. In
days gone by, the socialist label was employed with impunity in the mass media
to redbait and discredit. Today, it is a badge of honor with a 49 percent
plurality of all youth under 30 and a 56 percent majority across the age
spectrum of the Black community.

“The
percentage of Democrats who prefer capitalism over socialism as a more humane
system has shrunk to a low point of 23 percent. Today, registered Independents,
at 43 percent, are the top voting bloc; registered Democrats stand at 32
percent and Republicans at 23 percent.

“This tells
us more accurately why Bernie has been traveling the country for the past year
campaigning for a ‘kinder and gentler’ capitalism, for a ‘kinder, gentler’
system of exploitation and minority rule, dressed, of course, in the garb of
‘democratic socialism.’ And now Sanders is preparing his long-anticipated shift
to supporting the kind of cold-blooded racist, warmongering Hillary
Clinton-style capitalism that his soon-to-be-bewildered supporters had hoped to
flee from with his candidacy. As we anticipated, Sanders, along with Clinton, will now deploy the lesser evil
‘Trump’ card to once again frighten the unwary back into the Democratic Party,
as the graveyard of social movements.”

Mackler
added, “I was not at all surprised when Sanders announced: ‘The major political
task that we face in the next five months is to make certain that Donald Trump
is defeated, and defeated badly. And I personally intend to begin my role in
that process in a very short period of time.’”

I asked
Mackler why he had entered the U.S. presidential race, despite having
no chance of winning. “Elections in capitalist America are the billionaire’s game,” he
responded. “Working people have no horse in this race. We have no billionaire
candidates or corporate funders, or corporate media behind us. We don’t count
the votes. We don’t control any aspect of the rigged electoral charade. But
socialist election campaigns can win in another sense—in the end, a decisive
sense. We can use the occasion when interest in politics is at a high point, to advance the struggles of the 99
percent, of the vast majority who today struggle against the inherent evils of
capitalism.

“Socialist
Action is a party of and for every struggle that aims to organize capitalist’s
victims independently of and against the policies of the ruling rich. We are
among the best builders of the freedom struggle on every front possible. We
strive to be part of and help lead the independent, democratic, mass-action
united-front mobilizations and all others that are aimed at increasing
working-class self-organization, consciousness, confidence, cohesion, and
unity.

“We aim to
be an integral part of organizing the vast majority against the one percent—not
only against the one percent in the abstract, but against all their
institutions of power. Socialism, as opposed to its adulterated conception put
forward by Sanders, is truly a revolutionary project as well as a necessity.

The real
socialist revolution in the U.S., and everywhere else in the world, will usher in
for the first time in human history a society in which the vast majority who
create the nation’s and the world’s wealth will democratically rule in their
own name, through their own institutions, and in their own interests, as
opposed to the private profit corporate anti-human interests of the present
ruling elite.”

I asked
Mackler why he believed that the electoral system was rigged. “Again,
capitalist elections are in the exclusive purview of the billionaire rich.
Their twin parties—the Republicans and the Democrats—and their local, state,
and national electoral and judicial institutions devise, interpret, and enforce
their exclusionary election laws. Their corporate propaganda media effectively
exclude coverage of all views but their own. At best, and at great cost,
socialists are able to achieve ‘legal’ ballot status in but a handful of
states—and even here, no matter the seriousness of our campaign efforts, we are
consciously excluded from coverage.

“Even
Democrat Bernie Sanders learned, as in the New York and California primaries, that the vast number of
registered Independent voters were excluded from casting their votes for him.
His party’s handpicked ‘superdelegate’ process, in which a significant
percentage of Democratic Party convention delegates were essentially assigned
to Clinton before the primary process began,
tells us that even within the confines of the Democratic Party, the system is
rigged.

“Having
said this, however—and with full knowledge that the elections are
rigged—Socialist Action’s campaign does intend to win in a very real sense.
That is, we are asking our campaign supporters to check out our Facebook page,
website (https://votesocialistaction.org),
and other social media outlets, meet us in the streets where people unite to
fight back, and add their name (or pseudonym if necessary) as campaign
endorsers. We want to list these thousands of our socialist campaign
supporters—not to mention win them to joining our revolutionary socialist
party.”

I asked
what Socialist Action’s key campaign objectives are. Mackler responded, “First
and foremost, we want to educate and help organize radicalizing people to
definitively break from the twin parties of capitalism and all of its
candidates.

We believe
that all of the evils that millions, if not billions, across the globe are
becoming keenly aware of are inherent in the capitalist system itself. These
include endless predatory wars; government-promoted racism, sexism, and
homophobia in all their horrific manifestations; mass deportations,
terrorization, and demonization of immigrants; all-pervasive government
surveillance in the name of ‘national security’; multi-trillion-dollar
government bailouts of corporations; the imposition of massive across-the-board
austerity measures against the broad spectrum of working people and youth; the
permanent and irreversible consequences of fossil fuel-induced global warming;
and the deadly assaults on all aspects of our environment.

This system
today threatens all life on earth. Its madness daily poses the existential
threats of literally burning the planet until it becomes uninhabitable or
nuclear wars that murder billions in almost an instant and reduce the planet to
a state of radioactive oblivion.”

Mackler continued,
“Today capitalism and its very intelligent purveyors, that is all those who
consciously understand its horrors and yet organize to sustain it, have gone to
great lengths to camouflage and disorient its growing numbers of critics. The
Democratic Party, ever fostering the illusion that the system can be
effectively reformed, has always been capitalism’s first line of defense. It is
complimented by a host of others that are consciously deployed to assist in
heading off mass social and political dissent and anti-capitalist
working-class-based organization. These safety valves, or better, firewalls,
against the emergence of independent expressions of working-class organization
include the present parasitic pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy and the countless
tens of thousands of corporate-funded NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations]
that operate in virtually all social movements.

We must add
to this vast array of civil society’s sheepherding devices the Democratic
Party’s organized corporate funding of the hierarchy of Black and Latino
churches, along with the longtime corporate-dependent ‘civil rights’
organizations like the NAACP. And we must add into this mix of mind and social
control the corporate ownership and control over the media as well as the fundamental
‘public’ educational system itself. Indeed, the vast political, legislative,
and judicial system operates to lend an air of democracy, if not credibility,
to capitalism’s ever sought-after all-pervasive hold on social life.”

“Selecting
the least offensive of the millionaire and billionaire candidates that the
ruling rich periodically offer us during the election season,” Mackler
insisted, “is both a utopian pipedream and a critical impediment to principled
working-class politics.”

“Socialist
Action’s campaign is aimed at today’s new fighters against injustice: at the
youth who have learned from experience that their prospects are bleak in the
capitalist framework, at the demeaned and exploited immigrant workers, at those
who are inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement’s wide-ranging rejection of
U.S. racism and its institutionalized system of police murder, at the millions
who are rapidly coming to understand that the fossil-fuel corporate magnates,
like all others, subordinate the future of humanity to their private profits.

“Our
campaign is aimed at working people who want to revitalize and democratize the
trade unions and expand union power to the 90 percent of workers who are
without unions today. It is aimed at fostering the construction of a
class-struggle left wing in the unions, a militant fightback current that seeks
to organize the majority to fight in the political and economic arenas to
challenge the bosses’ parties on all fronts.

In this
context we are advocates of independent working-class political action based on
a reinvigorated, fighting, and democratic trade-union movement in alliance with
all the oppressed and exploited—that is, for a labor party that compliments and
enhances labor’s power in the economic arena with its own instrument in the
political arena.”

Mackler
concluded, “To be sure, socialists fight for all progressive reforms. We
actively participate in and support all who fight for a better world on every
front. Whenever working people independently organize to advance their own
interests—in mass mobilizations in the streets, in trade-union struggles at the
point of production, on picket lines, and at public meetings and rallies—we are
part of the struggle.

But we
harbor no illusions in the nature of the beast. It must be replaced in all its
fundamentals by the massive and concerted actions of the vast majority. That’s
the real meaning of the social and political revolution that serious socialists
fight for every day and seek to bring into being in a new world, where the horrors
of the present social order are forever ended.”

>> The interview above was conducted by Nick Baker of Socialist Action newspaper.